From Heaven to Hell

Right before one of our many road trips to Kentucky, my then 12 year old daughter took a rushed visit to the doctor to obtain medication for pain and coughing. The doctor gave her a prescription containing codeine, and told me it would make her sleep. Instead, we spent 12 hours in a small car with the equivalent of a monkey on speed. I remember the Doctor’s calm collected scientific explanation of what he considered an interesting phenomenon, the paradoxical reaction. I realized today that it is also the perfect term to describe what I’m been feeling this week. I know I should be grateful that my husband has cut back on his drinking, that he is going about the house lucid, and even being helpful, but it seems to be having the opposite effect on me. I am madder than I have been in years, and I’m feeling like the perfect bitch because of my reaction. I need to own my feeling in this place where I have declared I will always be honest.

I know I am capable of deep love, the kind where my life is of no importance, only that of the beloved. That is the overwhelming love I have for my children. Perhaps it is a selfish love for flesh of my flesh, but it is tangible, perfect, and unrelenting. I know I am capable of great passion too, in varying degrees between yearning and outright lust. If I am honest, and I swear I am working very hard on that, I have no regrets for the things I have done out of passion, although I am still trying to stop a knee jerk apology for some of the those passions disapproved by current moral code. I have told myself for many years that I stayed in this marriage because of love, but reading between the lines of my life, I know that if romantic love ever existed between us, it has been dead for at least a decade. Stupidly, I still sit Shiva with other mourners fled, the corpse long buried and consigned to the consuming worm.

I pulled out my marriage certificate today, looking for a loophole. The most glaring one is the fact that there are two similar pieces of paper in my file cabinet, neatly tucked into a folder labeled “Marriage”. Both of them declare, “till death do us part” to be the extent of the contract, but it is obvious that these words didn’t hold me the first time. I also looked through the folder labeled “Divorce”, and found the handwritten note from my mother congratulating me on the dissolution of my first marriage. What a damn nice little touch of incongruity that was. Anger was not allowed in my parent’s home, no slamming of doors, no raised voices, no bickering children. I learned very early to turn my rage inward and chastise myself for being unable to control my emotions. So here I sit, seething that he is doing this to hold me, to bind me back before I have loosened all the cords. I know if I accept this compromise of self, it will seem like progress, but the pathway will loop and turn and bring me back to this exact spot again. I will hold very tightly to this anger for the weeks and months ahead, and I will gather it inside, but not in that destructive way I was taught. That fury will be my last secret, and should suffice as a weapon to gain freedom on my own terms. I will close the door quietly when I leave.